Blog

Last month, after some prodding from a fellow mographer, I took the plunge and started digging into the world of Houdini. I'm obsessed. I often feel like SideFX took my favorite nerdy bits from Blender, After Effects, and Processing and swirled them all together into a genius workflow alongside their hyper-powerful VFX and simulation tools.

I always assumed Houdini was just a niche product for high-end vfx added in at the end of a production pipeline. From what I can tell I am far from the only one to hold this misconception. It can do all that classic Hollywood FX work, sure, but that's not what makes Houdini so uniquely powerful. This wizard-like power (seriously, it's fun) derives from a total conceptual shift that differentiates it from other 3D tools and it all boils down to one beautiful little word: Procedural.

Proceduralism is at the core of every tool in Houdini from simple box modeling to soft-body simulations and per-point attribute expressions. Watch any of the excellent (free!) SideFX produced training material and you are bound to hear the engineers and trainers talking about how to "think procedurally." I'll save my pro-proceduralism spiel for some other time, but I encourage you to check it out.

For now I leave you with this list of training materials for Houdini, though this list is really a study-guide for myself to return to. Full disclosure: This list was kickstarted from the list created by Houdini vet Ben Watts here. I'll be updating this list as I discover more. I hope you find it useful.

(Oh, and if you're just starting in 3d world I'll have a list of Blender resources soon too. I <3 Blender)